The Father of algebra

His
life

ABU
JA'FAR Mohammed
ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi was born sometime before 800 A.D. and died after 847
A.D. He flourished as a mathematician and astronomer who was a
faculty member at the "House of Wisdom" established in Baghdad by
Al-Mamun.

Harun
al-Rashid became the fifth Caliph of the Abbasid dynasty on 14 September 786,
about the time that al-Khwarizmi was born. Harun ruled, from his court in the
capital city of Baghdad, over the Islam empire. He brought culture to his court and tried to establish
the intellectual disciplines which at that time were not flourishing in the
Arabic world. He had two sons, the eldest was al-Amin while the younger was
al-Mamun. Harun died in 809.

Al-Mamun
became Caliph and ruled the empire from Baghdad. He continued the
patronage of learning started by his father and founded an academy called the
House of Wisdom where Greek philosophical and scientific works were translated.

Al-Khwarizmi'swork

Al-Khwarizmi
and his colleagues the Banu Musa were scholars at the House of Wisdom in
Baghdad. Their tasks there involved the translation of Greek scientific
manuscripts and they also studied, and wrote on, algebra, geometry and
astronomy. Certainly al-Khwarizmi worked under the patronage of Al-Mamun and he
dedicated two of his texts to the Caliph. These were his treatise on algebra and
his treatise on astronomy. The algebra treatise Hisab al-jabr w'al-muqabala
was the most famous and important of all of al-Khwarizmi's works. It is the
title of this text that gives us the word "algebra". Here
"al-jabr" means "completion" and is the process of removing
negative terms from an equation. For example, using one of al-Khwarizmi's own
examples, "al-jabr" transforms x2 = 40 x - 4 x2
into 5 x2 = 40 x. The term "al-muqabala"
means "balancing" and is the process of reducing positive terms of the
same power when they occur on both sides of an equation. For example, two
applications of "al-muqabala" reduces 50 + 3 x + x2
= 29 + 10 x to 21 + x2 = 7 x (one application to
deal with the numbers and a second to deal with the roots).